Ex-Dem Congressman: Voter Fraud Is Commonplace, Voter ID Is The Cure

Voter fraud is not a figment of your imagination, says former Congressman Artur Davis (D-Alabama).

The use of absentee ballots makes massive electoral fraud possible, Davis told the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro in a startling interview. Davis’s comments came months after a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted local NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers received a five-year prison term.

“Most voter fraud doesn’t happen on Election Day,” Davis said. “Very few folks are going to walk into a polling place and claim they’re somebody they’re not. It happens with the absentee ballots and counties in my old congressional district. Sometimes 50 percent of the votes cast in Democratic primaries were absentee ballots.”

“There is no reason that half the vote in a community ought to be absentee ballots when the number is 0.01 percent in most communities in the United States,” he said. “How do you get 50 percent of the Democratic primary electorate being absentee in the natural course of things? You don’t get that. That comes about when there’s a strategy of cooking the books at the polls, voting people named Donald Duck and manufacturing ballots.”

Davis can’t understand why those on the left oppose voter ID laws such as the law recently enacted in his home state of Alabama.

“People who are progressives should never be afraid of more transparency and accountability,” Davis said. “I always thought that one progressive core was that we want to know more and be more transparent about politics. The progressives I know believe in more campaign disclosure in terms of who’s putting money into campaigns. They believe in more disclosure in terms of how involved lobbyists are and special interests are in the process.”

“If you believe in more transparency around connections in politics and money in politics, how can you not believe in transparency when it comes to the core of politics which is voting?

Requiring people to identify themselves before casting ballots will cut down on voter fraud in Davis’s view.

“The right kind of voter ID law which of course will provide exceptions for old folks who don’t have licenses or people who are infirm and don’t have licenses, the right kind of ID law will provide free of charge an ID for people who want to vote,” he said.

“Those kinds of laws, they’re not suppressionary tactics. They’re not things that we ought to fear. They’re things that can make politics work better.”

ACORN and other left-wing groups have long argued that fraudulent registrations cannot become fraudulent votes.

“How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?” said GOP Indiana Secretary of State Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN), who in 2008 won an important Supreme Court case sustaining Indiana’s photo identification law.

“It’s almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there’s no way to trace it,” said Rokita who is now a Republican member of the House of Representatives.

Former ACORN/Project Vote employee Anita MonCrief agreed. “It’s ludicrous to say that fake registrations can’t become fraudulent votes,” she said. “I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”

And ACORN, which filed for bankruptcy in November 2010, was itself convicted of voter fraud in Nevada in April of this year. ACORN was also banished from Ohio in 2010 when it settled a state racketeering filed against it by the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, a project of the Buckeye Institute. Under the settlement ACORN agreed never to return to the state.

The remnants of the ACORN empire of activism are gearing up to help President Obama, a former ACORN employee, get reelected next year.

ACORN’s voter registration and mobilization arm, Project Vote, continues to operate, and state ACORN chapters have taken new names.

Two of those ACORN front groups, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), have been very active in organizing the increasingly violent Occupy Wall Street movement.

Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that has been tracking ACORN’s activities since 1998. Vadum’s book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration was published in May 2011 by WND Books. The book is Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Vadum is a nationally recognized expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and a frequent guest on Fox Business. His groundbreaking research on the organized crime syndicate was praised and cited by Michelle Malkin in her New York Times bestseller, Culture of Corruption. Malkin credits Vadum with being one of two people in the nation with the “foresight and insight in reporting on the [ACORN] story when no one else would.” Vadum’s work is also cited in David Freddoso‘s New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama, Arianna Huffington‘s Third World America, John Fund‘s Stealing Elections (revised edition), and Peter Schweizer‘s Architects of Ruin. Follow Matthew Vadum on Twitter.